HP says farewell to Helion Public Cloud

After months of deliberation, HP has this week confirmed that it will be pulling out of the public cloud scene, shutting the doors on its Helion Public Cloud offering at the end of January.

In a blog post announcing the news, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud Bill Hilf wrote: ‘We have made the decision to double down on our private and managed cloud capabilities.’ He said that HP’s cloud strategy will now focus on hybrid infrastructures, which the company has long pegged as the ‘future of enterprise IT.’

‘Today, our customers are consistently telling us that in order to meet their full spectrum of needs, they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud, as well as access to SaaS applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads. In addition, they are pushing for delivery of these solutions faster than ever before.’

Helion’s OpenStack platform which sits behind HP’s Helion CloudSystem private cloud offering will continue to operate. However, Helion Public Cloud will shut down on the 31st January 2016.

Hilf continued to advise that HP will ‘move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities,’ to guarantee optimum hybrid strategies for its customers.

HP has already set up a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide greater support for its hybrid Helion Eucalyptus delivery. According to Hilf, the company has also worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure.

‘We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure,’ he added.

The decision comes just two weeks out from the strategic split of HP into two separate businesses; enterprise, and PC and printers. The once pioneering firm has struggled to move into a modern tech environment defined by mobile and online services, and compete with fresher competition. In September, HP announced that it was cutting around 30,000 jobs in its enterprise division in response to revenue declines. In its latest financial report, the company’s profit was down 8% to $25.3bn (approx. £16.4bn).